Alabama 14

Listen to Alabama 14, an 83-year-old woman from Elkwood, Alabama, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 83

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 02/11/1937

PLACE OF BIRTH: Elkwood, Madison County, Alabama

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: White

OCCUPATION: retired high school and college English teacher

EDUCATION: master’s degree in English

AREAS OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

The subject spent most of her youth in Alabama, with brief stints in nearby Tennessee. As an adult, she has lived in New York, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and also in India.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

The subject, who is the wife of Tennessee 13, says that when she was teaching in the North, someone in a higher position announced publicly that her pronunciation of “wh-” words was wrong because she sounded the “h” sound. This angered her, and she was motivated to never tone down her Southern accent while working in education. She also mentioned that her grandmother’s Appalachian dialect sounded “Elizabethan,” or what many now assume Elizabethan English sounded like.

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: Adelind Horan

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 11/03/2021

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

I was born in a farm, uh, in, uh, Madison County, Alabama: a place called Elkwood. Uh, it’s about two miles from the Tennessee border. And th- the largest town around was about fifteen miles away, and that was Huntsville, Madison County. I, um, used to play in the watermelon patch and in the orchard, and I had a pet pig at one point. And I would watch hog-killing time in November, and I remember how sad it was when they killed my little pig that had grown up, um, for souse meat and bacon and ham that hung in the smokehouse.

Um, my sister and I (my sister Joyce and I) — she was two years younger — we were something to keep up with. We once went to the watermelon patch and broke fifty watermelons looking for the, the wa- the best, uh, ripe watermelon. Uh, and then our grandfather chased us with a razor strap, and we hid in the smokehouse, where all the hams were hanging. Uh, we played games like, uh, rover, pass the ball over, and whiplash. And we played under the [clears throat] big oak trees. And we sa- we sss-swung in the big swi-swing on the porch. And when the cotton was picked, our grandpa would allow us to ride on the wagon on top of the cotton, to go to the cotton mill. And we would pass the sugar-cane field. And he would stop and break a sugar cane and give it to us. And we would chew on that — get the sweetness out on the way to the cotton mill. …

TRANSCRIBED BY: Adelind Horan

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 13/05/2021

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY: N/A

COMMENTARY BY: N/A

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

The archive provides:

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• In most cases, an orthographic transcription of the speakers’ unscripted speech.  In a small number of cases, you will also find a narrow phonetic transcription of the sample (see Phonetic Transcriptions for a complete list).  The recordings average four minutes in length and feature both the reading of one of two standard passages, and some unscripted speech. The two passages are Comma Gets a Cure (currently our standard passage) and The Rainbow Passage (used in our earliest recordings).

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